The chairman of Air India may have offered an early clue into what caused one of its planes to crash last week, killing all but one person aboard. “The right engine was a new engine, installed in March 2025. The left engine was last serviced in 2023 and was due for its next maintenance check in December 2025,” Natarajan Chandrasekaran told India’s Times Now channel, according to the BBC. However, Kishore Chinta, a former investigator with India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, cautioned that an engine’s age is not always a direct indicator of its performance or condition. This is especially true for Boeing 787-8 aircraft, which use Genx-1B engines that are not maintained and replaced based on age, but data stemming from a separate performance monitoring system. Chandrasekaran expressed hope that information recovered from the aircraft’s black box, retrieved from the crash site in Ahmedabad on June 13, will shed more light on what happened before Flight AI171, en route to London’s Gatwick Airport, went down mere moments after take off. At least 270 people were killed in the crash, including dozens of victims on the ground.
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